From Politics & Society:Where do you think it went wrong nulli?
Giving non-property owners the right to vote? Giving women, young, minorities, recent immigrants, non english speakers, etc. the right to vote? Or was it just doomed from the start?
Dang, eddie. Did you pwn my computer and read the draft, file modification time 2020-10-12, of this thing that I seem to have not actually posted to the Wall Observer?
—BEGIN QUOTATION—by nullius • st_mtim = 2020-10-12 17:58:07.057600524 +0000Minimally revised on grounds of perfectionism.
[—a quoted quip about idiots taking IQ tests—]Immodest proposal: Only smart people should be allowed to take IQ tests, to learn to read, or to vote.
Every one being allowed to learn to read, ruineth in the long run not only writing but also thinking.
Only people working for a private income should be allowed to vote. No representation without taxation.
I disagree in principle with basing rights and privileges on taxation. Anyway, this presents an obvious practical problem: If people working for private income vote for a government that abolishes the income tax, then upon what principle should suffrage be based?
Historically, besides heritable class status, the single most effective guarantor of voter quality was a real property ownership requirement. People whose wealth is invested in illiquid, immovable property within a jurisdiction tend to think more long-term; and most especially, people who own their own homes (in contradistinction to investment properties) have the most to lose from bad government. Liquid, fungible, or easily liquidatable wealth,
i.e. capital is NOT comparable. If your personal wealth is only invested in the markets, then it is just too easy to pick up and move.
Naturally, I think that such a requirement must logically exclude mortgaged properties, which (especially in today’s society) are effectively rented from the bank.
In the United States, which has lamentably lacked
legal class distinctions from its inception, real property ownership was a common requirement in the beginning. Obviously, it was insufficient. In Europe, class distinctions also proved insufficient. Perhaps the whole concept of democracy should be questioned—but I digress...
Of course, all of this discussion is otiose. No jurisdiction with universal suffrage will ever have a voting majority vote to restrict the franchise; expansion of the franchise is a one-way ratchet which cannot be undone except by total “régime change”. Moreover, in a world in which such objectively important criteria as
reading tests (!) can be deemed “racist” (!!) by the world’s historic and histrionic leaders at Making The World Safe For Democracy, this is just the sort of
[...draft abruptly ends here; a cat must have knocked over my computer, or something...]
—END QUOTATION—
As for the rest of eddie’s list, it is more or less correct—albeit not necessarily for the reasons that liberals with knee-jerk reactions would assume—
and albeit incomplete. For if votes are allowed, then votes should be dear! Of what value is a thing so cheap that it is just given away to every precious snowflake?
Universal suffrage is vote inflation. Making everybody “free” by giving everybody a vote is like making everybody “rich” by printing lots of money.
Yes, that is an original observation on my part. Analogy credit: nullius.
Poll
